Haha, I doubt it. And I no longer read 50 books a year. I’ll be interested to see if I can figure out when the shift occurred. These days, at the end of a writing day, the last thing I want to do is read. Which is sad.

In my early writing years, when I was still flirting with the page here and there, all my writing time I spent hunched into a computer, writing short stories about food. The first one I wrote was about a cake that wouldn’t bake. I wrote one about a middle aged man making spinach soup as he thought about his mother’s death, another about sisters inventing gourmet ice creams to entice their starving mother to eat, one about a couple celebrating an anniversary over a multi-course menu and each course represented another argument. And on and on. One about a literal shit sandwich. I wish I had gone out in the world like you did, mingled a little, got some expert advice. It literally never occurred to me that I could.

Columbine felt like a turning point, didn’t it? Still feels like that to me.

I can’t remember the last time I read more than 20 books in a year. I need to step it up. Did you eat fat and lose weight??